[rescue] CD ROM Server

[Phil Stracchino]

Erie Patsellis wrote:
> As I go through my cave of treasure, I keep finding perfectly good stuff 
> that doesn't make sense for me to hold onto any longer, so expect more 
> listings as I come across stuff.
> 
> I have a 2 cabinet 56 CD ROM SCSI based server, from what I remember, it 
> has a EISA 486 based motherboard, booted from a floppy and loaded a 
> flavor of Novell, has 4 EISA SCSI cards, all drives present and are tray 
> loading. I will get some pics, but I need to get this gone and hate to 
> see it just become landfill fodder. Anybody close(ish) (within driving 
> distance) to Central IL interested?

Ah, EISA.

I remember trying to write an EISA configuration file once for a Media
Vision ProAudio Spectrum/16 sound card.  Oy gevalt.  The ECU's
custom-configuration tool didn't have enough configuration lines to
allocate all the ports and I/O addresses it used.

I remember buying an "upgradeable" ALR EISA 386 desktop PC.  Then going
to upgrade it about a year later to a 486 and finding that the cost of
the new 486 CPU daughtercard to upgrade it was $200 less than buying a
brand new ALR EISA 486 tower machine, and didn't include L2 cache.  Bait
and switch... yeah, technically you COULD upgrade it, but it made zero
technical or financial sense to do so.

So I found a monstrous super-tower case from Fry's, and a local
manufacturer's 486 EISA motherboard with far more capabilities than the
ALR one, talked another local company into selling me an engineering
prototype caching IDE controller that was blindingly fast and had
limited RAID capabilities (it could combine physical disks into a single
logical device, but it was a span, not a stripe), and built a machine I
was still using five years later for less than the price of the ALR
upgrade card.  Then I traded the ALR for ...  something.  I don't remember.


-- 
        Phil Stracchino                CDK#2
 Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
 phil.stracchino at speakeasy.net   alaric at caerllewys.net
 Landline: 603-429-0220           Mobile: 603-320-5438
        It's not the years, it's the mileage.